Love By the Lake
by amor-remanet
Summary: There's no way Cho is Harry's first. Slash, CDHP.


**Disclaimer:** Harry, Cedric, and Cho aren't mine; if they were, there would've been a whole lot less of Cho. Anyway, they're JKR's and I'll put them back when I'm finished.

Before they snog under the mistletoe, Harry tells Cho that she's his first.

The way he moves his tongue against hers says differently.

For all purposes, he could be bringing oral pleasure to her nether regions, delicately dancing, stroking her tongue the same way he strokes her hair, eliciting the same, sweetest response she both loves and fears, like a sugar rush straight to the brain. It might say something about her, couldn't it? That she loves snogging The Boy Who Lived, that he's entirely more sexual than she could have ever dreamt? If the stories are true, he should be in Slytherin, not Gryffindor. The lion is forceful, a rapist in a noble disguise. But the snake is a charmer, an expert at being self-serving through masterful control of others' little pleasures and unimportant sins. The lion with a snake's tongue…this is who has waited two years for this moment while the eagle played it cold.

But something doesn't feel right. This feels both new and so familiar, avant-garde but still the same, alive but reeking with the stench of death.

The water in the black lake is always ink-dark and uninviting, and now it has added "terrifying" to its list of adjectives in Harry's mind. Even the Durmstrang ship, sitting in the middle of the exhausted tumult can't break the monotonous drone of foreboding that the Second Task bestowed upon the lake. Harry has taken to staring at the waters at great length, in a vain attempt to plumb their depths. Part of him even wants to go back to them, back down to the Merfolk. If gillyweed could last more than an hour, he just might return there and get away from all this Triwizard insanity.

Ron and Hermione and Sirius are always sympathetic to him and his mad urges – if they weren't, the Philosopher's Stone wouldn't have been saved in their first year, and Sirius would still be wherever he'd been before, instead of in a cave. "Fulfilling my duty as godfather." It was nice to have him back and all, but it had been warm where he'd run off to, and now, even as February was drawing to a close, it was still cold up at Hogwarts. Still, Harry could never tell anyone about the longing to go back into the water, to sprout gills once more and just leave. Naturally, Ron and Hermione have noticed that he's been spending loads of time at the lake, but, if they think he's losing his grip, they haven't said a thing.

If only everything could stay that way…but it can't. Life goes on, green leaves turn to gold to red and fall, gray rain clouds have to surrender to a clear blue sky and children must become adults. "Nothing gold can stay." The only thing he remembers from Muggle School with no practical application whatsoever.

Suddenly, he feels a hand on his shoulder. It is bigger and stronger than his own. It feels like hard work and hard love simultaneously, and it sends shivers down his spine that even his long-standing crush on Cho Chang can't bring him. Leaning backwards, Harry falls into the lap and open arms of Cedric Diggory. Cedric smiles down at him, and, with that same strong delicacy, smoothes out Harry's unruly black hair. They let their eyes meet, gray and calm on green and tortured, skilled and knowing on terribly ignorant. Were there dust to kick up, their eyes could do it alone – beautiful contradictions of each other that just work so well. And when the dust settles, they'll be left with just each other: two Hogwarts champions, one brave and one hard-working, one Lion and one Badger, one older, more skilled, and easily more handsome and one gawky fourteen-year-old who everyone seems to want dead. To the outside world, they have nothing in common other than championship, which isn't much to begin with.

But these are just their masks. They can't be that way when they're alone. It just wouldn't work.

Cedric's arms are much stronger than Harry's, more protective and the way a boyfriend's arms should be. Like the other three Hogwarts Seekers – Harry, Malfoy, and Cho – he has a light build, clearly designed for speed and accuracy, but his hard work and constant helpfulness have paid off. The snow has just started to melt, leaving a nice patch of damp green by the lake. With a warm sigh, Cedric pulls Harry down into it, placing one of those knightly arms around the younger boy's shoulders. Involuntarily, Harry's lips quiver as the wind blows through the bud-less branches above them. How he so wants Cedric to press his lips against his own…underneath the blue sky with no one else around to see. With no one there to judge them, they could be, breathe each other in and let each other savor their tastes.

They haven't for weeks, on one Saturday night, right after the Second Task. In the midst of all the recklessness and chaos that the other students brought to their lives, they found solace under the bubbles of the Prefects' bathroom with each other. But, for all his midnight wanderings, Harry knows that they could never meet that way; Cedric will never break rules so recklessly, even for his boy, even with his boy's Invisibility Cloak. He just doesn't do things like that. He's a smart boy, a good boy…an unfailingly good boy, even, which is something Harry can never hope to be. The one who has to fight Voldemort every year, yes, he can be that, but he could never be as rule-abiding as Cedric. That's something Cedric clearly has on him, in addition to brains and good looks and talent.

And, apparently, boyfriend senses. Right as Harry begins to feel this, Cedric slips one of his strong fingers under the fourteen-year-old chin and lifts it up. With unspeakable delicacy and the kind of care he would show a china doll, Cedric presses his lips to Harry's. Their kiss is torrid, and falls away quickly, before Harry can get what he really wants. Cedric sees this and runs a hand down Harry's cheek, making the smaller boy shudder.

"We've got to stop meeting like this," he whispers warmly.


End file.
